Fracking In Balcombe: A Community Says No

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In Jan­u­ary 2010 Cuadrilla applied to West Sus­sex Coun­ty Coun­cil for plan­ning per­mis­sion to drill a explo­ration well, on a site where Cono­co pre­vi­ous­ly drilled a well in 1986, with­out suc­cess. Very few peo­ple were aware of this appli­ca­tion and those that were assumed that it would be a sim­i­lar sto­ry to Cono­co, decades ear­li­er. No one had heard of Cuadrilla or frack­ing and a men­tion of “stim­u­la­tion” in the plan­ning appli­ca­tion did not mean any­thing to any­one. There were no objec­tions and three months lat­er per­mis­sion was grant­ed with­out any fuss.

The world has changed since the mid-1980s though and where­as Cono­co were look­ing for con­ven­tion­al oil, in a reser­voir of per­me­able rock, Cuadrilla – spurred by sky high ener­gy prices – are pre­pared to go to much greater lengths to get hydro­car­bons out of the ground. Uncon­ven­tion­al oil and gas tar­gets much less per­me­able rocks, with dense­ly packed (usu­al­ly) hor­i­zon­tal wells and var­i­ous extreme stim­u­la­tion tech­niques, such as hydraulic frac­tur­ing. While in Lan­cashire Cuadrilla are focused on get­ting gas out of the Bow­land Shale, in Sus­sex they are after so called tight (shale) oil, sim­i­lar to the Bakken Shale in North Dako­ta.

 

If this explo­ration leads to full scale devel­op­ment at the well-spac­ing now com­mon in the Bakken, 4 wells per square mile, it could mean 32 wells with­in the parish of Bal­combe and over 300 with­in 5 miles of the vil­lage. Up to 1,200 wells might be drilled in the the whole of Cuadrilla’s licence area. Fur­ther west, in the cen­tre of the Weald val­ley where the for­ma­tions are deep­er, it is pos­si­ble that gas rather than oil may pre­dom­i­nate. Cel­tique Energie, who have licences across much of West Sus­sex, are brag­ging about quan­ti­ties of gas that would require thou­sands of wells to extract.

These devel­op­ments threat­en to indus­tri­alise the Sus­sex coun­try­side with well pads, and asso­ci­at­ed pipelines, com­pres­sor sta­tions and pro­cess­ing plants. One only has to look to the US, Cana­da or Aus­tralia what liv­ing in the mid­dle of such an oil/gasfield is like. Over 100,000 uncon­ven­tion­al wells have been drilled in the US in the last decade, and thou­sands in Cana­da and Aus­tralia. In parts of the US, drilling is start­ing to push into the out­skirts of cities, as they run out of coun­try­side to frack. See this arti­cle Frack­ing Sus­sex: The Threat Of Shale Oil & Gas for more details.

It was only fol­low­ing the pub­lic­i­ty around Cuadrilla’s mis­for­tunes in Lan­cashire (break­ing their first test well with an earth­quake they caused) that Bal­combe res­i­dents became aware of what was planned, and a pub­lic meet­ing was called in the vil­lage hall in Jan­u­ary 2012. Cuadrilla man­aged to invite them­selves to the meet­ing and came in will their PR team to smooth things over. After they had been grilled for sev­er­al hours by hun­dreds of angry locals, they retreat­ed to lick their wounds. How­ev­er with their tem­po­rary plan­ning per­mis­sion due to expire in Sep­tem­ber this year, they are now keen to pro­ceed as soon as pos­si­ble.

Recent­ly Cuadrilla returned to Bal­combe and held a “con­sul­ta­tion”, to explain their plans. Wary of their pre­vi­ous­ly recep­tion they booked a small hall for the after­noon that could only hold a few peo­ple at a time, and packed it with exec­u­tives. The vil­lage respond­ed, coat­ing the area in anti-frack­ing signs, organ­is­ing a kids anti-frack­ing pic­nic and mount­ing a con­tin­u­ous protest out­side the venue. As usu­al Cuadrilla were less than con­vinc­ing, with a Cuadrilla exec­u­tive even caught on tape admit­ting that every­thing they said sound­ed like “utter fuck­ing bull­shit”.

Mean­while secu­ri­ty guards, from the third worst com­pa­ny in the world G4S, have been present at the site 24 hours a day for sev­er­al weeks. Last week a small drilling rig arrived on site to drill a water mon­i­tor­ing well, in prepa­ra­tion for the main event. In response the locals begain organ­is­ing a Rig­watch out­side the site entrance, to keep track of what Cuadrilla are up to. On Mon­day a tea par­ty was held out­side to site, to protest Cuadrilla’s pres­ence.

Cuadrilla have still not cleared all the hur­dles they need to in order to com­mence drilling, how­ev­er. They require min­ing waste and radioac­tive sub­stances per­mits in order to dis­pose of the tox­ic and radioac­tive waste the drilling will gen­er­ate. In Lan­cashire the Envi­ron­ment Agency waved the require­ment for a per­mit allow­ing Cuadrilla to dump radioac­tive sludge from their Preece Hall site into the Man­ches­ter Ship Canal, but there is no infor­ma­tion about any plans for where this waste would go. The Envi­ron­ment Agency have launched a month long con­sul­ta­tion on the per­mits, poten­tial­ly delay­ing drilling into July.

Regard­less of these legal issues, Cuadrilla are faced with hav­ing to try to push through the drilling despite the near unan­i­mous oppo­si­tion of the local com­mu­ni­ty. Across Sus­sex peo­ple are equal­ly unkeen on the threat­ened indus­tri­al­i­sa­tion of the coun­ty. In Aus­tralia, where three gas com­pa­nies have already been forced out of New South Wales, com­mu­ni­ty oppo­si­tion has been high­ly effec­tive. The indus­try is sug­gest­ing black­mail­ing com­mu­ni­ties with the threat of with­hold­ing pub­lic ser­vices, or brib­ing them with cash pay­ments, to acqui­esce to the destruc­tion of their envi­ron­ments. They are clear­ly wor­ried by the mount­ing oppo­si­tion.

You can object to Cuadrilla’s “Min­ing Waste” appli­ca­tion here…

You can object to Cuadrilla’s “Radioac­tive Wastes” appli­ca­tion here…